Many a hero in Rudyard Kipling’s stories was undone by the enervating heat of the Indian summer, waiting for the monsoon. In The Man Who Would Be King, the “red-hot wind from the westward” booms among tinder-dry trees and “now and again a spot of almost boiling water would fall on the dust with the flop of a frog, but all our weary world knew that was only pretence”. New Delhi felt like that this summer. There were intermittent signs of the rains, and the electricity needed to work fans and air-conditioning units would come and go.

This week’s disastrous power outages were the culmination of what has become depressingly familiar. They were unusual only in that they happened to everyone at once, and for such a long stretch. Instead of parts of a state or a city being left without electricity, most of northern and eastern India was affected. For two successive days and nights, around 670 million people were left in chaos as even the capital’s metro system stopped working. Miners were trapped underground. Certain states were alleged to have taken more than their share from the national grid, confident that they could get away with it. This was the largest power failure in history, impacting on almost one in 10 people alive on the planet.

At the root of all this lies the Indian government’s abject failure to keep pace with the way the country is changing. Whether it be power lines, roads, schools or ports, infrastructure is not being built or upgraded fast enough. Electricity is often stolen from overhead lines, and the government has not been responsive. The influential regional politicians can leave prime minister Manmohan Singh’s coalition government in Delhi looking weak, and at the mercy of events. Unlike China, where the centre is strong and directional, India’s centre is starting to look more toothless than it has for decades.

Over the past decade, demand for electricity both from industry and middle-class consumers has been rising annually by nearly 10 per cent. Although there has been partial reform in the power sector, it has not been carried through. The five national regions of the power network do not have an adequately integrated grid system. High-voltage transmission lines, needed to move power from one part of India to another, have not been built.

In May, I visited a massive hydropower scheme being built in Punatsangchhu in Bhutan. Standing inside a hollowed-out mountain in what felt like a cross between a giant cathedral and the set of a James Bond film, I saw the future home of the largest turbine in Asia. All the power generated here will be sold to India, earning impressive revenues for the mountain kingdom of Bhutan. But given the demand, it will be a drop in the ocean.

It was not a surprise when earlier this year Standard & Poor’s issued a report stating that India might well be the first BRIC economy to become a “fallen angel” – by which the ratings agency meant it would no longer be a favourable home for investment, and might instead go backwards. Rather than a nascent superpower, India was presented as a country that was in many respects unable to fulfil the just demands of its citizens.

In the power sector, the heavy subsidies on the price at which electricity is sold to farmers makes it an unattractive prospect for investment. So far, no politician has been willing to reform this anomaly, which allows rich and poor landowners to receive their electricity virtually free. This is the third year in a row in which the monsoon has been feeble, and farmers have responded by pumping scarce water out of the ground, which in turn has provoked a power shortage.

In some states, such as Gujarat, the local government runs a successful commercial grid alongside the heavily subsidised official one. As in so many areas of modern Indian life, richer people can buy their way out of the sclerotic, statist system that is left over from the days when India was a command economy. On the day that the power failed in Delhi, a friend took her children to a shopping mall, confident that emergency generators would be keeping it cool.

With its impeccably awful sense of timing, the Indian government chose the day of the blackout to announce that the power minister, Sushilkumar Shinde, was being promoted to the home ministry. While the country flailed, he gave a TV interview sitting in the leafy garden of his bungalow in Lutyens’s Delhi. Aged 70, Mr Shinde is younger than some cabinet ministers in a country where the average age is only 25. He oozed indifference and a sense of political entitlement, declaring himself to be an “excellent, excellent” power minister, and saying that America had not been as quick at mending its grid when it broke down. “My officers have restored the lines the day before yesterday… India is expert in this sector.” He was met the next day with headlines expressing astonishment.

Many democracies have voters who feel angry with their leaders, but in India the extent of the disconnect is shocking. Some of the basic institutions of the Indian state appear to be falling apart, and while both business and the public are crying out for leadership and reform, politicians are not responding. The collapse of the power grid, plunging urban India into darkness, is only the latest symptom.